The best illusion at the Museum of Illusions is the one that makes it look like you鈥檙e desperately dangling high off the front of the Old Courthouse.
No, wait. The best illusion at the Museum of Illusions is actually the one that makes one person look very tall and another person look very short, no matter what their actual sizes are.
No, wait again. The very best illusion at the Museum of Illusions is the one that makes it look like you鈥檙e doing a handstand on a table at a local diner.
The point is, there are a lot of illusions at the Museum of Illusions. And many of them, like these, are designed especially to shared on social media.
鈥淲e had one picture that went viral; we had, like, 10 million hits on one illusion,鈥 says Steve Garmon, the museum鈥檚 general manager.
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The Museum of Illusions company was founded in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2015. The 50度灰视频 location, at City Foundry, which opens May 24, is the seventh corporate-owned spot, Garmon says. A number of other locations around the country are franchises.
The location in Denver is the one that had the illusion that received so many hits. It鈥檚 the same illusion as the handstand-on-the-diner-table illusion, but the setting is different. In Denver, you can stand on your head or your hands on a subway car.
That particular illusion is achieved by merely nailing the diner furniture or the subway seats to the ceiling and hanging from them. Someone taking a picture can rotate the image before posting it, creating the gravity-defying image.
Garmon says people like optical illusions because 鈥渢hey play tricks on your mind. They show you how your brain functions, and your vision and your perceptions.鈥
Something as familiar as a mirror 鈥 or several mirrors 鈥攑lays a role in many of the illusions. With the help of mirrors, you can step into a human-sized kaleidoscope or place your head at the business end of another, head-sized one.
Both of these illusions are best observed by another person, preferably with a camera.
Mirrors also help a dodecahedron 鈥 a 12-sided shape 鈥 appear to extend many times below the floor. And they are used to make a one-foot ladder extend infinitely below you and another one above you.
Other illusions at the museum depend on sloped floors and design for their visual trickery. The Ames Room uses a steeply sloped floor and a skewed design on the wall that tricks the viewer into thinking the trapezoidal space is actually a normal cube. That鈥檚 the room that makes people standing inside appear to be short or tall, depending on where they stand.
The Tilted Room is even more disorienting. Again, a steeply sloped floor and a mirror make it look like you are leaning backward or forward in a physically impossible manner. The illusion plays such tricks on your brain that it is not recommended for people with balance problems or epilepsy.
The Tilted Room is one reason everyone signs a waiver when they buy a ticket, Garmon says. And the Vortex Tunnel is another.
In this illusion, visitors walk through a tunnel on a perfectly stable catwalk 鈥 with handrails, which many find helpful. But lights appear to be swirling in a spiral around them, which can disturb their sense of equilibrium.
鈥淧eople think the whole thing is moving, and it鈥檚 not. It just plays with your mind. But I get real dizzy. I fall to my knees. It鈥檚 a trip,鈥 Garmon says.
Also featured in the museum is a painting of a baseball player whose eyes follow you wherever you move, like the eyes of the Mona Lisa, but gaudier. Two sculptures based on the principle of a zoetrope use a precisely timed strobe light to make the swiftly turning objects appear to be standing still or to be made out of writhing ramen noodles.
One illusion, the Symmetry Room, uses a mirror to make a visitor appear to be suspended in mid-air. Another uses a mirror to make it look like a visitor鈥檚 disembodied head is served on a platter, like John the Baptist.
As you leave the illusion part of the building, before you step into the inevitable gift shop, a lighted sign hangs above the doorway.
It says, 鈥淏ack to reality.鈥